Stepping Forward with Exoskeletons: Team IHMC?s Design and Approach in the 2016 Cybathlon

Exoskeletons are a promising technology that enables individuals with mobility limitations to walk again. As the 2016 Cybathlon illustrated, however, the community has a considerable way to go before exoskeletons have the necessary capabilities to be incorporated into daily life. While most exoskele...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics & automation magazine 2017-12, Vol.24 (4), p.66-74
Main Authors: Griffin, Robert, Cobb, Tyson, Craig, Travis, Daniel, Mark, van Dijk, Nick, Gines, Jeremy, Kramer, Koen, Shah, Shriya, Siebinga, Olger, Smith, Jesper, Neuhaus, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Actuators
Assistive technology
Cognition
Exoskeletons
Legged locomotion
Man-machine systems
Reliability engineering
Trajectory
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Exoskeletons are a promising technology that enables individuals with mobility limitations to walk again. As the 2016 Cybathlon illustrated, however, the community has a considerable way to go before exoskeletons have the necessary capabilities to be incorporated into daily life. While most exoskeletons power only hip and knee flexion, Team Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) presents a new exoskeleton, Mina v2, which includes a powered ankle dorsi/plantar flexion (Figure 1). As our entry to the 2016 Cybathlon Powered Exoskeleton Competition, Mina v2's performance allowed us to explore the effectiveness of its powered ankle compared to other powered exoskeletons for pilots with paraplegia. We designed our gaits to incorporate powered ankle plantar flexion to help improve mobility, which allowed our pilot to navigate the given Cybathlon tasks quickly, including those that required ascending movements, and reliably achieve average, conservative walking speeds of 1.04 km/h (0.29 m/s). This enabled our team to place second overall in the Powered Exoskeleton Competition in the 2016 Cybathlon.
ISSN:1070-9932
1558-223X
DOI:10.1109/MRA.2017.2754284